Managing Water Quality under Uncertainty: Application of a New Stochastic Branch and Bound Method.

The problem of water quality management under uncertain emission levels, reaction rates and pollutant transport is considered. Various performance measures: reliability, resiliency and vulnerability are taken into account. A general methodology for finding a cost-effective water quality management program is developed. The approach employs a new idea of the stochastic branch and bound method, which combines random estimates of the performance for subsets of decisions with iterative refinement of the most promising subsets.